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After three hours of driving that were probably going to feature in my nightmares for years to come, I was finally only forty-five minutes from Mushroom Cottage. I had been diverted twice, had narrowly avoided a collision with an airborne wheelie bin, and had had to slalom around numerous branches that Edna had capriciously ripped from trees on her way past.
I should have been on the final stretch now, except a ‘Police: Road Closed’ barrier was blocking my way. I stared through the windscreen at the barricade while Google Maps plotted me a new route. Even though everything looked vastly different in the rain, I was pretty sure this was the same road Finn and I had travelled on twelve months ago on the day we’d first discovered the cottage.
The route my phone found for me would add an extra half an hour to my journey and would take me through some fairly remote hamlets and countryside. I sighed in frustration and executed a turn in the road that contained many more points than the three the Highway Code told you to use.
The signpost for the ford forced me to slow down. I looked down at my phone, which was still advocating that I should continue straight ahead. ‘Really?’ I asked it. I took its lack of response as an affirmative.
Way back when I was seventeen and being taught to drive by my dad, he gave me a stern warning about never driving through deep standing water. I recalled that now, as I brought my car to a stop in front of the ford. I didn’t need the yardstick gauge beside the flowing water to know it was already at a level where only an idiot would decide to proceed. The ford, which in summer was probably just an elongated puddle, today looked more like a river. It was flowing fast and deep. It was dangerous. And it was also my only possible route to Mushroom Cottage.
I patted my steering wheel as though it were a horse I was encouraging to make an impossibly high jump.
‘If you do ever have to drive through deep water, go slow and steady,’ I could hear my father telling seventeen-year-old me.
‘Slow and steady,’ I muttered as I released the handbrake and crept, foot by foot, into the water.
36
FINN
‘Finn. Finn, wake up. Open your eyes.’
Finn jerked. He’d slipped away again, and during that time the water had crept another few inches closer to his face. The passenger seat was now completely under water.
‘Finn.’
The voice came again. He identified the source of the sound. It was coming from the back seat of the car. He turned slowly, tears already dripping silently into the water below him. It had been so long since he had seen his face or heard his voice.
‘Hello, son.’
Curiously, his father looked no older. There was scarcely a discernible age difference between him and Finn. Finn’s confused subconscious clearly hadn’t been able to imagine what twenty-seven years would have done to his father’s appearance.
‘Dad.’ It was all he could manage. Finn’s throat had locked, and he really didn’t want to break down in front of this man, even if he was only a creation of his imagination. He still wanted his father to be proud of him.
‘I’ll alwaysbeproud of you,’ the man in the back seat said, somehow knowing what Finn was thinking. He rested his hand on Finn’s shoulder, and it felt so unbelievably real that he couldn’t help the anguished sound that escaped him. Was he close to the end, to be conjuring up an illusion this vivid? Were the failing synapses and neurons in his brain giving him one last opportunity to say all the things he’d never had the chance to say to his father in real life?
‘It was all my fault,’ Finn said on a rush.
Once again, his father was immediately on Finn’s wavelength.
‘Bullshit.’ If Finn had needed further confirmation that this was indeed a hallucination, he had it now. His dad had never, ever sworn. ‘What happened was an accident. A terrible, unavoidable accident. Just as this is.’
Finn shook his head. Noticing as he did so that the water had risen.
‘I should have been braver. I should have jumped when everyone told me to. Then you’d never have gone back inside – and neither would Mum.’
The hand was back on his shoulder, squeezing it gently.
‘Listen to me, son. Nothing and no one could have stopped me trying to get to you. Fifty firemen couldn’t have held me back. You’re my boy.Of courseI was going to try to save you. You’ll understand what I mean one day, when you have kids of your own.’
Finn looked around at the wreckage that was fast disappearing beneath the storm water. ‘I don’t think that one’s on the cards for me.’ He made a sound, halfway between a laugh and a sob. ‘I always thought if I didn’t have a family, then no child of mine would ever be left alone if anything happened to me. But who lives their life like that? I found this incredible woman who wants to share her future with me, to be the mother of my children – and I finally realised that that was what I wanted too.’ His voice cracked. ‘This time I found the courage to jump. But I waited too long to tell her, and now it looks likeGemma’s the one I’ll be leaving alone.’
‘Don’t be so sure. You just hang on, son. You’ve got a hell of a lot to live for, and someone very special waiting for you.’
‘I wish you could have known her, Dad. You would have loved her – it’s impossible not to.’
His father said nothing. With a Herculean effort, Finn used the seat belt to haul himself up and look into the back of the car. It was empty.
*
